VF.COM

Seeking Justice in Africa

The International Center for Transitional Justice works with societies that are recovering from war and attempting to establish long-term stability. Suliman Baldo, a deputy director of I.C.T.J., is an expert in conflict resolution. VF.com sat down with Baldo recently to discuss Africa's attempts to move beyond war.

How do you deal with the legacy of war crimes when a conflict finally ends and people are ready to move on with their lives?

This is where the concept of transitional justice comes in. You are in a post-conflict situation, and you have to deal with an ugly past of massive atrocities and of violations of human rights. Several approaches are possible. Accountability is reserved for the most serious crimes and for those who are most responsible for planning and carrying out these crimes. But there are also processes for the acknowledgement of wrongs that have been done to the victims, and the acceptance of the idea of reparations, of compensating victims for their losses and suffering. There is also the idea of reconciliation. In the context of Africa, a lot of conflicts and civil wars play out at the local level and take the shape of intercommunal fighting. Often they are driven by the manipulation of ethnic factors by belligerents. But communities are naturally inclined to want to continue their coexistence, their sharing of resources, their intermarriages, their interactions. Reconciliation for them is what's known, rather than the exception. It is conflict and war that are aberrations.
What are some of the specific ways you can encourage reconciliation?

Well, one is the process of truth-telling—people coming together in a truth commission, for example, and those who have committed atrocities admitting to these atrocities voluntarily. Then the victims tell their stories as well. All of that must be taken into account and reckoned with. Another tool is reparations for these victims or communities, not only material or monetary compensations but also symbolic ones—like the building of memorials, or the return of some tokens that are very important for the victims or their families or for the community. Or perhaps you can recognize the suffering of an entire group by building a cultural center, to give that group a chance to express its identity.
How, then, do you deal with the perpetrators?

Look at northern Uganda, where the Lord's Resistance Army said it wouldn't sign any peace agreement unless the indictments handed down by the International Criminal Court were lifted. But it was actually the threat of accountability and the intervention of the I.C.C. that have driven the L.R.A. to the negotiating table. For 20 years they never talked to the public, or to the media, or made their opinion heard, or even mentioned why they were fighting. And then all of a sudden they are all over the place, giving interviews to the BBC, to correspondents of various international newspapers, explaining that they are fighting for a cause. It's totally unconvincing, but at least they are trying to make an effort, because they feel there is a genuine possibility of being held accountable for all the damage they have caused. So this is a step toward peace.
What about when the perpetrator is a country's government? How do you negotiate the problem of state sovereignty?

We can stick with the example of Uganda and its willingness to cooperate with the I.C.C. in the investigation into the L.R.A.'s crimes. Here, Uganda as a sovereign state is the victim, and it has every reason to pursue this case and to cooperate with the I.C.C. In fact, it was a referral by Uganda to the I.C.C. that enabled the investigation to go ahead. But Uganda is also a perpetrator of massive human-rights abuses in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. It invaded Congo in 1997 when it went to war with Laurent Kabila, and occupied territory in eastern Congo, particularly in Ituri, a district of northeastern Congo that is rich in resources. The Ugandan army trained thousands of child soldiers in Congo—for the warlords and rebel leaders who were fronting an operation of invasion and occupation. So Uganda is a perpetrator but is not being looked into. This also applies to Rwanda, an occupying power in Congo that was shown by international observers, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to have been involved in significant violations of human rights in Congo, contributing to the three million or more who have been killed there. At the same time, Uganda and Rwanda were major recipients of foreign development assistance in Africa. They were at the top of the list across the board, from the European Union, the United Nations, the United States, Britain, the World Bank, you name it. How is it that states that were abusive and responsible for such a level of human destruction are at the same time respected because they are doing good work at home? Why didn't the international community look beyond the border of their own states and see their conduct in neighboring countries, as regional powers? So we have countries that are touted as exemplary, but in fact are abusive. This shows that the international system has a lot to do yet in terms of enforcing international law and being consistent in applying that law.
Former Liberian warlord and president Charles Taylor recently refused to appear at his trial in The Hague. How important is this trial for coastal West Africa?

This was a subregional conflict involving Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast. The root causes are extreme poverty, corruption of the ruling classes, and a youth bulge. With no functioning national economy, there was no reason to give people hope for development or even earning a living wage. So it becomes easy for adventurers to entice the youth into joining one armed group or another. And when war ends in one country, people move on to the next and are recruited as mercenaries by other armed groups in neighboring countries. This is the significance of the trial of Charles Taylor. He is being tried for crimes committed in Sierra Leone. Both Liberia and Sierra Leone are in a post-conflict situation, but the root causes are still very much the same. The area remains very fragile. The national economies can't absorb the populations. These small countries are rich, but their resources have been diverted by corrupt rulers into private pockets, with total disregard for any responsibility toward the population. In Liberia there is a commitment, a political will, to take on the issue of corruption and work toward reviving the national economy and infrastructure. But it's an uphill battle. You need massive investment initially, and I don't think this is forthcoming, despite all the sympathy and support that is being displayed toward the government of Liberia. Sierra Leone started earlier; there's some stability there. But fundamentally I don't think the root causes of conflict have been seriously taken care of there. I'm concerned that in the long term these countries could relapse again, because the same factors are at play.
How big of a blow to your work is it that the United States refuses to sign on to the I.C.C.?

It's a blow to the credibility of the United States. On the question of child soldiers or land mines, for example, the U.S. is in the minority and is siding with pariah countries. The U.S. has a lot of influence, and to have the U.S. on the side of the I.C.C. would definitely be a plus. But the international community didn't wait. Countries have joined and have ratified the I.C.C. statute, and the court is now operational. Interestingly, when the U.N. Security Council referred the Darfur case to the I.C.C., the U.S. didn't veto that resolution, but abstained. That shows a certain pragmatism. Maybe it signals a change of attitude, at least in the U.S. bureaucracy toward the International Criminal Court—that we'd better perhaps have a case-by-case approach, or that the I.C.C. is not all bad.
Non-African countries often get tangled up in African conflicts—both politically and militarily. How can African countries seek justice against Western or other governments that might have been involved in war crimes and the like?

In a way, the conflicts in many regions of Africa are historically an extension of the colonial period. And there are situations where the former colonial power has continued to exert a considerable influence in its colonies, during the Cold War in particular. Conflicts in Africa were proxy wars between the Eastern and Western blocs. But African states do not yet have the means to hold international powers responsible. Why? Because even if they are nominally independent at the political level, these countries continue to be dependent on the international powers that be. In many cases they are dependent on their former colonial powers. They are sort of satellites. Look at France, maintaining a lot of influence in Africa through a system of economic and monetary controls, and very much intervening in the internal politics and policies of many sovereign independent states on the continent. Also, there isn't yet a change in the prevailing attitudes of international powers toward acknowledgement of their own role historically in causing massive human-rights violations and abuses in countries in Africa. It's not only the colonial era—there were whole centuries of enslavement, in which millions upon millions of Africans were killed. Africa was robbed of its human capital for generations. But there aren't international mechanisms to enforce responsibility, despite the fact that much of the wealth in the West in the pre-industrial era was drawn from slavery, and later on from colonialism and even neo-colonialism more recently. So there is an entire system of injustice and reckoning that is still to come. I don't see it happening now, and I don't believe it's in the power of African states to do anything about it for the moment. It is a process that will take time.

Austin Merrill's writing on Africa has appeared in The New Republic, Wired, The New York Observer, Tin House, and elsewhere.